


Oranges and Spice

by a_t_rain



Category: Hamlet - Shakespeare, SHAKESPEARE William - Works
Genre: Class Issues, First Meetings, Gen, M/M, University, Unrequited Crush
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-16
Updated: 2014-11-16
Packaged: 2018-02-25 13:54:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,678
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2624225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_t_rain/pseuds/a_t_rain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Horatio and Hamlet meet at Wittenberg.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Oranges and Spice

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for tree_and_leaf as part of the Big Gay Hamlet Ficathon, although it turns out I'm not so good at writing gay!Hamlet, so this is mostly gen.

It was not the dark-haired boy’s looks that made Horatio fall in love with him, although he was well-favored enough that Horatio would have looked twice at him if he had been a customer in his father’s shop. Nor was it the fact that the boy spoke Latin with a Danish accent, although Horatio was still in his first pangs of homesickness, and was only too glad to recognize a fellow countryman. It was not even the stranger’s quick wit, nor his willingness to spar with their masters at disputation, although these traits had already made him stand out among the new scholars, and Horatio had been perplexed to hear him argue vigorously against one professor who affirmed the existence of purgatory, and just as boldly against another who denied it.

In Horatio’s world, you were either for purgatory, or against it. He was not sure to make of someone who disputed both positions, and he would have dismissed the dark-haired boy as one of those fantastical scholars who tried to draw attention to themselves by disputing _everything_ – but his voice, and his arguments, rang with sincerity. And he had shivered, a little, when he said, at last, “I hold not with Luther, nor with the pope, but with Socrates: we are only wise when we know what we do not know. And of death, we know nothing but that we must go, we know not whither.”

Horatio hadn’t been sure that the shiver wasn’t an orator’s trick the first time. The second time he watched more closely, and knew that it was genuine. And that was when he fell in love with the boy.

* * *

Young as he was, he knew how to arrange a love-affair when he was at home. Someone came into the shop, and you looked longer and more intently at him than you needed to, and if he lingered in the shop and gazed back at you, he was interested. And you let your fingers brush against his when you were wrapping up the goods he had chosen, and you offered to deliver them to his home after the shop had closed. And then he said yes, and told you where he lodged.

Horatio always slipped a little something extra into the parcel at that point. An orange or a lemon if they were in season, or a little packet of cloves or cassia. It wasn’t payment or bribery. It was just that when you really liked someone, you wanted to give him the best that you had.

But he was in Wittenberg now, among gentlemen. (Real gentlemen, not jumped-up grocer’s sons who were foolish enough to think they could fetch gentility from Wittenberg.) It wouldn’t do to make the dark-haired boy a present of an orange, even if Horatio had been able to afford an orange. Real gentlemen could have all the oranges they wanted, any time they wanted. They would laugh at a present like that. And the dark-haired boy was certainly a real gentleman; he dressed soberly, and Horatio had hoped at first that he was only a charity scholar like himself, but when he worked up the courage to approach the boy he saw that it was not so. His clothes might not be gaudy, but the cloth was good, and it took a great deal of dye (Horatio knew) to achieve that shade of black.

“ _Salve_ ,” said the boy.

Horatio started. He hadn’t meant for the stranger to notice him just yet. “ _Salve_ ,” he said, and stammered out some foolish remark or other about the lecture they had just attended.

“Oh!” said the stranger in Danish. “You are a countryman of mine, I think. I am glad on’t.”

“Yes,” said Horatio, relieved that the other boy had switched to Danish first. It wasn’t that there was anything _wrong_ with his Latin – he could follow the lectures well enough, and read and write as well as any of them – but he found his tongue in knots when he tried to speak the language. Most of the other scholars had grown up speaking Latin and Greek with private tutors. Horatio had only been to grammar-school, where boys were beaten with the rod for talking in any language whatsoever. “Er, my name is Horatio.”

“Mine is Hamlet.”

“Like the king?” As soon as he said that, he could have kicked himself. Probably, _everybody_ Hamlet had ever met said “Like the king?”

“Aye. A hard name to live up to. But I was born on the same day that my – that our king overcame Fortinbras, so they could scarcely have christened me anything else.”

“I saw him once,” said Horatio. “He is a goodly king.”

Now he _really_ wanted to kick himself. As if he had any business judging the king’s looks, or as if he’d ever seen any other kings to compare him to!

“So he is. Everyone says I am not much like him.”

“What, do they expect you to be like the king because you have the same name? How foolish of them.”

“Aye, but people say all manner of foolish things,” said Hamlet. “I am glad that you do not. I have wanted to meet you, you know. You listen, and do not speak; that is rare in Wittenberg, where every man loves the sound of his own tongue.”

Horatio, almost dizzy with the pounding of the blood in his head, scarcely what he said next, nor what Hamlet replied, but somehow the conversation turned into an invitation to take some wine in Hamlet’s rooms.

“Your parents must live very near Norway,” Horatio remarked as they walked, “for word of the king’s victory to have reached them in time for your christening.”

Hamlet looked keenly at him. “You are clever,” he said. “Why do you not speak more in disputation?”

It took him a moment to be absolutely sure that Hamlet was not mocking him, and by the time he _was_ certain of this, Hamlet, whose mind seemed to range farther and faster than anyone else’s, was chattering away about the theories of Copernicus. In trying to keep up with his companion, Horatio altogether forget that Hamlet had never answered the implied question about his parentage and birthplace.

* * *

The wine was very good; heated, and flavored with spices, it took off the chill of a Wittenberg autumn. Horatio could taste cinnamon, nutmeg, and orange-peel, as well as some other spices he did not recognize. He had been right: these were common and unremarkable flavors if you were a gentleman born. He had nothing, nothing to give his new friend.

Hamlet’s voice interrupted his despair. “What think you of our fellow-scholars, Horatio?”

Horatio was startled into honesty. “Most of them seem more in love with their own wits than with scholarship. I had hoped for more.”

“And I? Do you think so of me?”

“No,” said Horatio positively. He could not think anything very clearly at the moment, but he did recognize that Hamlet was the sort of person he had expected and hoped to meet in Wittenberg: a man intoxicated by ideas.

“You are not flattering me?”

“Why would I want to flatter you?” Horatio asked, trying to ignore the fact that there were already about five hundred reasons why he wanted this strange boy to think well of him. “I’ve only just met you.”

“Indeed.” A smile that he could not quite read played about Hamlet’s lips. “We are very nearly perfect strangers. I do desire that we may be worse ones.”

This might, Horatio thought, be the time to let his fingers brush against Hamlet’s – accidentally. He had almost made up his mind to try it when the door of his fellow-scholar’s rooms burst open, and two more young men tumbled in, both talking at once.

“My lord, we have been looking everywhere for you –”

“You hold yourself too far from company, my lord –”

“He _has_ company, you fool!”

“So I do,” said Hamlet. “May I present Horatio, a countryman of ours. Horatio, these are my friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.”

Horatio bowed and flushed, realizing all at once that if Rosencrantz and Guildenstern – who had every appearance of being gentlemen born – addressed Hamlet as “my lord,” then a grocer’s son _certainly_ ought to have been doing so all along. “Sirs, I am honored. My – my lord, I thank you for making me known to your friends.”

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern helped themselves to wine and began chattering away at a gallop – about Nature and Fortune, and about the scholar who was said to have raised the devil, and about Democritus and Heraclitus, and about people Horatio had never heard of in his life.

Hamlet tapped him on the shoulder. “In love with their own wits, as you said,” he whispered, “but they’re not bad sorts. You’ll come to like them, I think.”

At last Rosencrantz and Guildenstern tossed back the last of their wine. “Well! We’re bid to supper at Wagner’s! Are you coming? No? Well, God keep your highness!”

When they had gone, Horatio turned to Hamlet, ashen-faced. “Your – your _highness?_ ”

“Well – yes. Now you see that my mother had another reason to name me after the king, even before word of his victory reached Elsinore.”

Thank _God_ , Horatio thought, that he had not tried – well, anything. Belatedly, he remembered to kneel. “My lord! Why did you not _tell_ me?”

Hamlet smiled, a little sadly. “A foolish vanity. I only wondered – I have often wondered – what it would be to have a friend who did not know me as the prince, only as myself. Dost forgive me?” The prince contemplated Horatio, who was still kneeling in silence, and began to look rather alarmed himself. “Come,” he said, extending his hand, “say that you’ll give me your pardon.”

“I do,” said Horatio, grasping his prince’s hand.

Hamlet's smile had gone a little twisted. “Because I am the prince, and because other men always say what the prince wants to hear?”

“No,” said Horatio, taking courage. He rose to his feet. “Because it is the best that I have.”


End file.
